“I don’t think it will be Newsstands 101. I think it needs to be educating the buyers. It’s the readership that’s looking for that content at newsstand that will ultimately carry the message. We just need to make sure that we stay viable at the front end long enough for that message to be had, because to your point, I think the younger buyers out there who don’t have an intrinsic knowledge of what the magazine brings and that lean-back experience, they traditionally get their information and their news off the Internet, but the buyers aren’t necessarily there yet. Eventually, that will evolve.” Chuck Howell (on educating buyers on the importance of magazines and that lean-back experience)…

“If we’re talking newsstand-specific, it’s managing the rate-based sales and how do we extend that runway, while best leveraging the uptick in the special interest publications. So what keeps me up at night is making the right long-term decisions for what seems to be short-term problems.” Chuck Howell…

Providing leadership and vision to Meredith’s procurement activities, ensuring that the sourcing and negotiation strategies employed complement overall business strategy and deliver value by reducing costs while improving the quality of purchased goods and services, Chuck Howell values his role as vice president of Strategic Sourcing, Production and Newsstand Operations. Chuck Howell is also a man who knows there has to be a way to make the supply chain healthier and more economically savvy than what’s out there today.

And whether through more consolidation of critical services and functions or some unknown cure that lies beneath all of the temporary bandages that have been applied to newsstands, Chuck sees the glass as half full. He believes that there are ways to integrate better with consumer marketing so that extending the runway on newsstand leveraging data is possible. And data is an important part of Chuck’s modus operandi. With his educational background in accounting and his past accomplishments at Meredith, such as helping bring Meredith’s very large consumer marketing database in-house from a previously outsourced environment, he is a man who knows the value of information.

I spoke with Chuck recently and we talked about newsstand and sourcing and about how Meredith remains bullish on print SIPs and their value. It was a very interesting conversation, one that I think you will find just as informative, So, please enjoy the Mr. Magazine™ interview with Chuck Howell, vice president of Strategic Sourcing, Newsstand and Production Operations.

But first the sound-bites:

On the climate in today’s magazine and magazine media industry and his take on things: We know that the trend in this industry isn’t a favorable one across the board, if you’re talking about magazines. Media is better. But there is a lot of consolidation, and one not mentioned is paper mills, there has been a lot of consolidation there too. I think in this kind of supply chain, where you have all of this consolidation and all the way up the supply chain, you’re not going to get to a point where you have a publisher who’s fully integrated all the way down the supply chain. But I think collaboration across that supply chain and opening up communications and speaking critically about what we’ve done in the past and how we should move forward together, given the climate, I think that’s what is going to save the day for us.

On what he is changing or planning to change as he moves forward in his role at Meredith: I don’t know where other publishers sit, but since we brought sourcing up, we’ve always looked at the total cost model and we know that changes that happen in our consumer marketing department impact production, impact our distribution, impact our paper vendors and others, but what does that mean altogether? So, we’ve started looking at collaborative value creation across this supply chain, which means how can I work better with the printer perhaps to drive mailing solutions, as an example, so that I can take money out of the total cost of things and maybe the printer can leverage that and sell it to other publishers and I can certainly leverage it, from a cost production standpoint, and drive efficiency into the channel that way.

On Meredith now being the largest magazine media company in the U.S. and whether he thinks others will observe them and try to follow in their footsteps: At Meredith we’ve always kind of forged our own road, if you will. I think now we’re just more visible and more public than we were in the past. We’ve always been known as an efficient operator; we’ve always tried to make decisions that made the best financial sense for our employees and our shareholders. As far as moving an industry, it is a firmly entrenched industry; I know we’re not specifically talking about newsstands here, but what I think we have at Meredith is a lot of outside-of-the-box thinkers who are good at reacting to the environment.

On how he views the newsstands today: Our view of the newsstands has kind of changed with this acquisition. And you’re right, we are bullish on the SIPS. Traditionally, if the marginal economics didn’t make sense for us, for our rate-based titles, we could acquire readership through consumer marketing less expensively than we could on newsstands, so we would pull the newsstand titles down. We would change it to book of record and we would pull it off of the mass distribution at newsstands. And that’s kind of how we view our books; we take that critical eye toward the legacy Time Inc. books as well, as they relate to newsstand. Obviously, People is the number one runner and will never change. I don’t think anybody can ever knock People out if its spot.

On whether he thinks America’s newsstands are shifting from frequency-based titles to more SIPs: It all goes to what’s going to resonate with the readers, and People has had its declines as well, it’s just that the mass of that magazine’s distribution and how closely people hold it, it will be out there for a while. I do think personally that entertainment and sports and things like that, where you can follow your favorite actor on Twitter with their feeds, or your favorite athlete, that information is almost instantaneous to you, so that’s why I believe we’re seeing a downtick in some of those categories and an uptick in the special interest media. And here at Meredith, we call Magnolia, it started off as a special interest media title that just happen to have a rate base, but the business model was built around the bookazine, if you will.

On any challenges he and his team face today that maybe didn’t exist five or ten years ago: Ten years ago maybe, I don’t know about five years ago, because we’ve been dealing with this and it’s been changing at what seems to be an accelerated pace over the course of the last five years. I don’t know if you know this, but when I took over the responsibility for newsstands, it was right before Source went out, like a week before Source went out, so I kind of drank from the firehose there for a while, trying to understand what this whole channel was about. But with the consolidation of wholesalers and the shrinking rack space up front, as you mentioned, a lot of the newsstand category managers are younger and I think all of those things kind of coalesced to give us an environment where we need to be hypersensitive to their time, hypersensitive to understanding that the newsstand buyer is declining and going to retail with a crisp message.

On whether he thinks educating retailers about the importance of magazines and newsstand will be an uphill battle or more like Newsstand 101: I don’t think it will be Newsstands 101. I think it needs to be educating the buyers. It’s the readership that’s looking for that content at newsstand that will ultimately carry the message. We just need to make sure that we stay viable at the front end long enough for that message to be had, because to your point, I think the younger buyers out there who don’t have an intrinsic knowledge of what the magazine brings and that lean-back experience, they traditionally get their information and their news off the Internet, but the buyers aren’t necessarily there yet. Eventually, that will evolve.

On his background in data analysis and what that experience tells him about the future based on the science and data: I’m an accountant by education and I came to Meredith about 15 years ago and I was one of the people responsible for bringing the database in-house from Acxiom. We’re on the Teradata platform internally, and this is our consumer marketing database. I was responsible for implementing the CRM, and I went from that into, as you mentioned before, strategic sourcing and then picked up pre-media operations, production operations and newsstands. So, I started with data and Meredith, obviously, getting the right data in to our analytics team. And we leveraged that to a huge extent, maybe the best in the market, at leveraging that subscriber data to sell subscriptions.

On whether he sees the cup of the future as half full or half empty: I see the cup half full simply because, again, Meredith didn’t leverage that data in analytics as much as Time did, so there’s green ground there for us to work. Then I also think there are ways that we can integrate better with our consumer marketing brother across the street so that we can, again, extend the runway on newsstand leveraging data.

On what he would hope to tell someone one year from now that his areas at Meredith had accomplished: I would say that we are leveraging the resources that we have. We’re leaning into the things that give us a competitive advantage in tier point, that’s our marketing data analytics and our shopper insights. And we have outsourced our commodity functions like billing and collections, which makes us leaner and more efficient in leveraging those critical resources.

On anything he’d like to add: Everything is always a pendulum. It’s eventually going to swing back the other way. I think for the channel to be healthy there is going to have to be more consolidation, and when I say that; back in the day when there was 50, 60, 70, I don’t know how many different wholesalers out there, there was a need for a national distributor presence. I think there are functions that the national distributor traditionally does that needs to be done. I think there are functions that the wholesaler does that needs to be done. I also think that there’s a lot of synergy between those two that if we were to sit down as a channel, the big players: the publishers, the wholesalers, the national distributors, and the retailers. And we were to take a processed view of things, and without deference for how the industry grew up, but with deference to the critical functions that need to happen, and we were to place the critical functions in the right places and we were to part everything out; I’m a content creator, should I necessarily be in the best position to tell you where the magazines will sell the best at retail?

On what he would say is the biggest misconception people have about him: Sourcing has given me quite a reputation. (Laughs) I would say that a lot of folks think that I’m a bull in a china shop. And I would say that I’m a calculated bull in a china shop.

On what someone would find him doing if they showed up unexpectedly one evening at his home: I haven’t been told yet what I’m doing tonight when I get home. (Laughs) We have a small acreage outside of town that keeps us busy during the summer. We’re always doing landscaping projects, hauling rocks or cutting trees down, things like that. And that’s how we keep busy. Our kids are all grown. We have two big dogs that are now our kids. We have a 185-pound St. Bernard and a 180-pound Newfoundland. So, after a long day’s work, we’ll be sitting around a campfire, probably drinking wine and feeding the dogs hot dogs off the campfire.

On what he would have tattooed upon his brain that would be there forever and no one could ever forget about him: I think that the biggest compliment that somebody could give me would be that I do what I say that I’m going to do. That I’m a man of my word.

On what keeps him up at night: These have been crazy days with the acquisition, right? (Laughs) Meredith digesting this huge acquisition that we just did. I say just did and it’s been nine months now. I would say that what keeps me up at night is the responsibility to our employees and our shareholders, and that’s across the breadth of my responsibilities. That’s sourcing, newsstand, production and operations, and pre-media. And by that I mean making the best decision so that it matches the value in the longer term. There are a lot of decisions that we can make in the short-term that will get the job done, but how is that going to impact tomorrow or impact next year? That responsibility is what keeps me up at night.

And now the lightly edited transcript of the Mr. Magazine™ interview with Chuck Howell, vice president of Strategic Sourcing, Newsstand & Production Operations, Meredith Corporation.

Samir Husni: With everything that’s happening in the magazine industry and magazine media, in today’s climate, such as magazine companies buying out magazine companies, printers buying other printers, wholesalers buying other wholesalers, the shrinking retail space; do you think there’s a better time for you to be a senior vice president of all of Meredith’s strategic sourcing, production, and newsstand? What’s your brief elevator pitch of what’s going on today?

Chuck Howell: That’s a tall question there. (Laughs) We know that the trend in this industry isn’t a favorable one across the board, if you’re talking about magazines. Media is better. But there is a lot of consolidation, and one not mentioned is paper mills, there has been a lot of consolidation there too. I think in this kind of supply chain, where you have all of this consolidation and all the way up the supply chain, you’re not going to get to a point where you have a publisher who’s fully integrated all the way down the supply chain.

But I think collaboration across that supply chain and opening up communications and speaking critically about what we’ve done in the past and how we should move forward together, given the climate, I think that’s what is going to save the day for us. But from a strategic sourcing standpoint, it just means our strategies need to change. It needs to be more about collaboration and honesty and working together than it is about leveraging one vendor off of another, because we’re not going to have that too much longer.

Samir Husni: In your role at Meredith, what changes are you doing or planning to do when it comes to the sourcing, the production and the newsstands?

Chuck Howell: I don’t know where other publishers sit, but since we brought sourcing up, we’ve always looked at the total cost model and we know that changes that happen in our consumer marketing department impact production, impact our distribution, impact our paper vendors and others, but what does that mean altogether?

So, we’ve started looking at collaborative value creation across this supply chain, which means how can I work better with the printer perhaps to drive mailing solutions, as an example, so that I can take money out of the total cost of things and maybe the printer can leverage that and sell it to other publishers and I can certainly leverage it, from a cost production standpoint, and drive efficiency into the channel that way. So, I would call it collaborative value creation across the supply chain.

Samir Husni: Now, as the largest magazine media company in the United States and one that is putting more titles, both the SIPs and the regular frequency titles, in the marketplace, do you think that you’re now the cruise ship that’s going to be observed and followed, that other companies are going to follow your navigational route? Are you creating some new way of doing business?

Chuck Howell: At Meredith we’ve always kind of forged our own road, if you will. I think now we’re just more visible and more public than we were in the past. We’ve always been known as an efficient operator; we’ve always tried to make decisions that made the best financial sense for our employees and our shareholders. As far as moving an industry, it is a firmly entrenched industry; I know we’re not specifically talking about newsstands here, but what I think we have at Meredith is a lot of outside-of-the-box thinkers who are good at reacting to the environment.

What do we see coming down the road? And how can we best leverage our resources to address those things? I said in another interview that nothing is off the table, the senior management team here is very open to listening and understanding what folks are seeing and what they believe might be the change of the day, what might be the next thing coming down the road that we need to embrace and to leverage. So, I think in the past we may have been more nimble, but I don’t think we’ll lose that with this acquisition.

Samir Husni: Let’s dissect your role as a senior vice president; let’s start first with the newsstand operations, because again, Meredith has always been a big player on the newsstands, mainly with their SIPs. It’s my understanding that this year you’re putting over 400 SIP titles or bookazines on the nation’s newsstands. Is this too much; is this overwhelming? How do you view newsstands today?

Chuck Howell: Our view of the newsstands has kind of changed with this acquisition. And you’re right, we are bullish on the SIPS. Traditionally, if the marginal economics didn’t make sense for us, for our rate-based titles, we could acquire readership through consumer marketing less expensively than we could on newsstands, so we would pull the newsstand titles down. We would change it to book of record and we would pull it off of the mass distribution at newsstands. And that’s kind of how we view our books; we take that critical eye toward the legacy Time Inc. books as well, as they relate to newsstand. Obviously, People is the number one runner and will never change. I don’t think anybody can ever knock People out if its spot.

But yes, we’ve seen an uptick in SIPs over the course of the last couple of years, the bookazines, and the content that we provide there. So, we are leaning into those books. Newsstand became a thing for us because with the acquisition of Time Inc.’s People and just the critical mass and volume and the revenue that People brings, and certainly Time had more SIPs out in the market than we did and we’ve increased that again this year.

Samir Husni: If you look at retail and you look at the shrinking space, is America’s newsstands changing from more frequency-related magazines to more bookazines and SIPs?

Chuck Howell: It all goes to what’s going to resonate with the readers, and People has had its declines as well, it’s just that the mass of that magazine’s distribution and how closely people hold it, it will be out there for a while. I do think personally that entertainment and sports and things like that, where you can follow your favorite actor on Twitter with their feeds, or your favorite athlete, that information is almost instantaneous to you, so that’s why I believe we’re seeing a downtick in some of those categories and an uptick in the special interest media. And here at Meredith, we call Magnolia, it started off as a special interest media title that just happen to have a rate base, but the business model was built around the bookazine, if you will.

That was a homerun for us and I know you’ve talked to Doug Olson about that. That was and is a homerun for us. And that’s what it’s all about, is finding the content that will resonate with readers.

Samir Husni: As you and your team find that content, what are some of the challenges that you’re seeing today on the newsstands and on the retail front that maybe didn’t exist five or ten years ago?

Chuck Howell: Ten years ago maybe, I don’t know about five years ago, because we’ve been dealing with this and it’s been changing at what seems to be an accelerated pace over the course of the last five years. I don’t know if you know this, but when I took over the responsibility for newsstands, it was right before Source went out, like a week before Source went out, so I kind of drank from the firehose there for a while, trying to understand what this whole channel was about.

But with the consolidation of wholesalers and the shrinking rack space up front, as you mentioned, a lot of the newsstand category managers are younger and I think all of those things kind of coalesced to give us an environment where we need to be hypersensitive to their time, hypersensitive to understanding that the newsstand buyer is declining and going to retail with a crisp message. And TIR had always been the 800-pound gorilla in the market with People and I think they’ve been a good steward of the industry. But what we’re doing is trying to scale our business better and position the channel to scale better as well, which is what we did in outsourcing our billing and collections.

So, we’re trying to scale the business better in light of the decreasing wire up front; we’re trying to position Comag to go in to the retailer with a crisp message about the value of magazines instead of TIR going in and Comag going in and you have RS2 going in and talking to them about magazines, then TNG going in with a different strategy or approach. So, we’re trying to work more collaboratively with the channel so that we can go in and not confuse, but deliver a crisp message to the category manager. I think what we’ve done in outsourcing some of that work that our field-facing sales force had done is enabled or begun to enable that conversation to be had in a more succinct way.

Samir Husni: Between you and Comag, when it comes to educating retailers on the importance of magazines and newsstands, do you think this will be an uphill battle or more like Newsstands 101?

Chuck Howell: I don’t think it will be Newsstands 101. I think it needs to be educating the buyers. It’s the readership that’s looking for that content at newsstand that will ultimately carry the message. We just need to make sure that we stay viable at the front end long enough for that message to be had, because to your point, I think the younger buyers out there who don’t have an intrinsic knowledge of what the magazine brings and that lean-back experience, they traditionally get their information and their news off the Internet, but the buyers aren’t necessarily there yet. Eventually, that will evolve.

What we’re trying to do at retail is again, instead of me going in and talking to a young buyer about the strategies they should take on the front end and Comag coming in with a completely different message because of the interests of their client base, and RS2, who the retailers have contacted to help them make some of these decisions, coming in with their two cents on what should happen, and TNG, who actually owns RS2, coming in and maybe aligning with RS2 or with a slightly different tweak on what should happen; it has to be confusing for those guys.

So again, we’re trying to take that fight back upstream and turn it into an empirically-based analysis on the planogram, if you will, and the wire up front. If we can break that down to empirically-based analysis; what’s going to make the retailer the most money; what’s going to make the wholesaler the most money, and what’s going to make the publisher the most money.

And if we can find the middle ground on all of that, then I think this channel can be healthy again. I don’t think it’s healthy now. Part of the reason that I don’t think it’s healthy is because there is not a cost of entry for some of the smaller, I call then ankle biter publishers who – I might drop an SIP in the market and do all of the research and my editorial staff has done all of the research and amalgamated all of that content, we drop in a quality product and it sells well. And then somebody comes along who is a small ankle biter, and who puts out almost the exact same cover, with almost the exact same content, but not procured with as much discipline, and drops it on the newsstand and it sells just as well. But they didn’t have the cost of entry that I had getting to the table. I think that’s going to have to eventually rationalize before this industry is healthy again.

At the end of the day when we talk about the ankle biters, it’s really how do we resonate with the reader. Time Inc. and that iconic brand, people know that brand. And people know the Meredith brand, but the readers are the ones who give us a license to educate them, right? So, to me, especially on newsstand and especially with our SIPs, it’s me as a reader and me as a newsstand buyer, who am I going to give license to educate me? Whose book am I going to pick up? Am I going to pick up Meredith’s SIP because I know that they’re the expert in these categories? Or am I going to pick up the ankle biter because maybe it’s less expensive?

I don’t know what the answer is, but somehow we have to pull it up from just the content or the category or the cover to who am I giving, as a reader, the license to educate me?

Samir Husni: With your background in data, data analysis and data processing, as you look at all of the data, do you see the cup as half full or half empty? What’s your gut feeling telling you based on the science and data?

Chuck Howell: I’m an accountant by education and I came to Meredith about 15 years ago and I was one of the people responsible for bringing the database in-house from Acxiom. We’re on the Teradata platform internally, and this is our consumer marketing database. I was responsible for implementing the CRM, and I went from that into, as you mentioned before, strategic sourcing and then picked up pre-media operations, production operations and newsstands. So, I started with data and Meredith, obviously, getting the right data in to our analytics team. And we leveraged that to a huge extent, maybe the best in the market, at leveraging that subscriber data to sell subscriptions.

What we didn’t do well, and we shied away from, again, because legacy Meredith wasn’t that reliant on newsstand sales for rate-based titles where we had subscriber data, and we certainly were for SIPs, but what we didn’t do well is leverage data as well as legacy Time Inc. does on newsstand. Legacy Time Inc. retail can go in and tell us through some of the programs that they have, they can tell us that Chuck Howell bought People 10 out of the last 12 weeks. And so, I might not want to market for a subscription to Chuck Howell because he’s a retail buyer and we want to keep him as a retail buyer. We don’t want to offer him a subscription.

The data analytics is key to how we put the right product out in the right pockets at the right time. And we’re well-poised to do that now as larger Meredith with the analytics teams; I can’t say enough about the highly-regaled, seldom-seen analytics team that sits at TIR, and the retail marketing team that also sits at TIR. And the knowledge that they have about the buyers couples with the people who do the retail analytics in-store.

Time Inc. leveraged newsstand data way better than Meredith did, so that’s a little bit of a learning curve for us legacy Meredith folks, but these people are incredibly talented and incredibly respected in the industry around retail analytics.

Samir Husni: Back to my original question, do you see the cup half full or half empty as you look toward the future, based on your data background?

Chuck Howell: I see the cup half full simply because, again, Meredith didn’t leverage that data in analytics as much as Time did, so there’s green ground there for us to work. Then I also think there are ways that we can integrate better with our consumer marketing brother across the street so that we can, again, extend the runway on newsstand leveraging data.

Samir Husni: If you and I are talking a year from now and you’re giving me a recap of what Meredith has accomplished in 2019 in the areas that you oversee, what would you hope to tell me?

Chuck Howell: I would tell you that we are leveraging the resources that we have. We’re leaning into the things that give us a competitive advantage in tier point, that’s our marketing data analytics and our shopper insights. And we have outsourced our commodity functions like billing and collections, which makes us leaner and more efficient in leveraging those critical resources.

Samir Husni: Is there anything else you’d like to add?

Chuck Howell: Everything is always a pendulum. It’s eventually going to swing back the other way. I think for the channel to be healthy there is going to have to be more consolidation, and when I say that; back in the day when there was 50, 60, 70, I don’t know how many different wholesalers out there, there was a need for a national distributor presence.

I think there are functions that the national distributor traditionally does that needs to be done. I think there are functions that the wholesaler does that needs to be done. I also think that there’s a lot of synergy between those two that if we were to sit down as a channel, the big players: the publishers, the wholesalers, the national distributors, and the retailers. And we were to take a processed view of things, and without deference for how the industry grew up, but with deference to the critical functions that need to happen, and we were to place the critical functions in the right places and we were to part everything out; I’m a content creator, should I necessarily be in the best position to tell you where the magazines will sell the best at retail? Or shouldn’t somebody closer to the retail pockets, like a wholesaler, be in a better position to do that? If we were to part out all of those critical functions and put them with the right player, what would that industry look like?

I have upward of 15 different data systems that can track pockets for me in the industry, in the ever-shrinking industry. (Laughs) I have 15 systems that can tell me their view of the world on how many pockets are out there and who has what pockets. And that’s just not efficient in this day and age. There should be one that everybody can leverage.

With this condensing industry, this channel does not have the volume running through it to afford all of this overhead that the channel has. And I’m not talking about just the publisher or just the wholesaler, I’m just saying the channel in and of itself has way too much overhead and we need to find a way to scale it back, scale our collective business, if our business is newsstand, how do we scale our collective business down? And we’re not going to be able to do that without collaboration across the channel.

Samir Husni: What do you think is the biggest misconception people have about you?

Chuck Howell: Sourcing has given me quite a reputation. (Laughs) I would say that a lot of folks think that I’m a bull in a china shop. And I would say that I’m a calculated bull in a china shop.

Samir Husni: If I showed up unexpectedly at your home one evening after work, what would I find you doing? Having a glass of wine; reading a magazine; cooking; watching TV; analyzing data or something else? How do you unwind?

Chuck Howell: I haven’t been told yet what I’m doing tonight when I get home. (Laughs) We have a small acreage outside of town that keeps us busy during the summer. We’re always doing landscaping projects, hauling rocks or cutting trees down, things like that. And that’s how we keep busy. Our kids are all grown. We have two big dogs that are now our kids. We have a 185-pound St. Bernard and a 180-pound Newfoundland. So, after a long day’s work, we’ll be sitting around a campfire, probably drinking wine and feeding the dogs hot dogs off the campfire.

Home is therapeutic, and it’s maintaining that place and throwing something on the grill and trying to realax.

Samir Husni: If you could have one thing tattooed upon your brain that no one would ever forget about you, what would it be?

Chuck Howell: I think that the biggest compliment that somebody could give me would be that I do what I say that I’m going to do. That I’m a man of my word.

Samir Husni: My typical last question; what keeps you up at night?

Chuck Howell: These have been crazy days with the acquisition, right? (Laughs) Meredith digesting this huge acquisition that we just did. I say just did and it’s been nine months now. I would say that what keeps me up at night is the responsibility to our employees and our shareholders, and that’s across the breadth of my responsibilities. That’s sourcing, newsstand, production and operations, and pre-media. And by that I mean making the best decision so that it matches the value in the longer term. There are a lot of decisions that we can make in the short-term that will get the job done, but how is that going to impact tomorrow or impact next year? That responsibility is what keeps me up at night.

If we’re talking newsstand-specific, it’s managing the rate-based sales and how do we extend that runway, while best leveraging the uptick in the special interest publications. So what keeps me up at night is making the right long-term decisions for what seems to be short-term problems.